1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to rule-based media content processing across different contexts, and in particular to providing media objects with methods and rules for interaction with target contexts.
2. Description of the Related Art
Media content has become more pervasively employed in information technology. Media content includes (but is not limited to) pictures, audio, video and associated metadata. The importance of media is directly related on how usable the content in the target environment is, that is, content should be easily searchable to locate the desired fragment, and content should be in the proper format for the target environment.
Methods for formatting and processing media content are known in the art. Existing solutions address mainly the processing of static media content in a context, and address very limited automatic transformations based on limited information on the media such as mime type or file extension. Some solutions address the specific problem of automatically adapting the format of a document to a specific viewer; other solutions address the automatic transcoding of content in a content distribution network. However, the available art does not address the general problem of making the content aware of different contexts. In known solutions, the rules to deal with different media are all hardwired into the applications, and not present in the content itself.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,023,714 entitled “Method and system for dynamically adapting the layout of a document to an output device,” addresses the specific problem of automatically adapting the format of a document to a specific viewer. U.S. Pat. App. No. 2003/0225723 A1 entitled “Content transcoding in a content distribution network,” addresses the automatic transcoding of content in a content distribution network, based on conditions for selecting particular associated transformations to be applied to a master content.
U.S. Pat. App. No. 2002/0052849 A1 entitled “System and methods for the production, distribution and flexible usage of electronic content in heterogeneous distributed environments,” describes a system to support creation, distribution and flexible usage of electronic content, where a content creator can create and associate a sphere of fair use and content modulation rules definitions with content.